Wednesday, May 25, 2011

It’s time we introduced Hesiod, the other notable Archaic
Greek writer besides Homer.

Hesiod is less of a mythical figure than Homer because we
actually know some things about him. For
example, we know that he was born and lived in Boetia and that his father
hailed from Cyme in Asia Minor. Hesiod was raised in Ascra near Mount Helicon.

See below:

Herodotus says something about him – “Homer and Hesiod were
the two poets who composed Theogonies and described the gods of the Greeks
giving them all their appropriate titles, offices, and powers, and they lived,
I believe not more than 400 years ago.” It is believed that Hesiod lived some
time during the eighth century B.C.

Hesiod, like Homer, is known primarily for two long poems,
his titles being Theogony and Works and Days. Theogony is one of
the primary sources of Greek mythology, successful because it pulls many of the
mythical stories together in a single narrative. One of the hallmarks of the
work is that it asserts the authority of Zeus over all the Greek people rather
than trying to establish a connection to a specific living dynastic line.

In this post we will concentrate on Works and Days, an 800
line poem which is not idyllic like Homer, but instead describes the moral life
of a farmer. The setting for the poem is the dispute between Hesiod and his
brother Perses over the brother’s trickery in obtaining the majority of the
inheritance meant for both of them. Hesiod urges his brother to give up
selfishness which will destroy his virtue and maybe his life. In the first 369
lines he moralizes by telling two stories: the evil of Pandora (1- 109) and
the ages of man put on earth by Zeus and how violent men were punished
(110-369).

But you, Perses, listen to right and
do not foster violence; for violence is bad for a poor man. [215] Even the
prosperous cannot easily bear its burden, but is weighed down under it when he
has fallen into delusion. The better path is to go by on the other side towards
Justice; for Justice beats Outrage when she comes at length to the end of the
race. But only when he has suffered does the fool learn this.

But for those who practice violence
and cruel deeds far-seeing Zeus, the son of Cronos, ordains a punishment.

But
you, Perses, lay up these things within your heart and [275] listen now to
right, ceasing altogether to think of violence. For the son of Cronos has
ordained this law for men, that fishes and beasts and winged fowls should
devour one another, for right is not in them; but to mankind he gave right
which proves [280] far the best.

With
verse 370, Hesiod transitions from his brother’s scolder to an agricultural
consultant reminiscent of Cato’s De Agri
Cultura. As he moves along the advice takes on the appearance of the Farmer’s
Almanac.

[370]
Let the wage promised to a friend be fixed; even with your brother smile—and
get a witness; for trust and mistrust alike ruin men.

More
hands mean more work and more increase. If your heart within you desires
wealth, do these things and work with work upon work.

[405]
First of all, get a house, and a woman and an ox for the plow—a slave woman and
not a wife, to follow the oxen as well—and make everything ready at home, so
that you may not have to ask of another, and he refuse you, and so, because you
are in lack, the season pass by and your work come to nothing.

Then
remember to hew your timber: it is the season for that work. Cut a mortar
three feet wide and a pestle three cubits long, and an axle of seven feet, for
it will do very well so; [425] but if you make it eight feet long, you can cut
a beetle
from it as well. Cut a felloe (wagon wheel) three spans across for a wagon of
ten palms' width.

So
soon as the time for plowing is proclaimed to men, then make haste, you and
your slaves alike, [460] in wet and in dry, to plow in the season for plowing,
and bestir yourself early in the morning so that your fields may be full. Plow
in the spring; but fallow broken up in the summer will not belie your hopes.

But
if you plow the good ground at the solstice,[480] you will reap sitting, grasping a thin crop in your hand, binding the
sheaves awry, dust-covered, not glad at all; so you will bring all home in a
basket and not many will admire you.

While
it is yet midsummer command your slaves: “It will not always be summer, build
barns.” Avoid the month Lenaeon,(end of January) wretched days, all of them fit to skin an ox, [505] and the
frosts which are cruel when Boreas blows over the earth.

Then
put on, as I bid you, a soft coat and a tunic to the feet to shield your
body,—and you should weave thick woof on thin warp. In this clothe yourself so
that your hair may keep still [540] and not bristle and stand upon end all over
your body. Lace on your feet close-fitting boots of the hide of a slaughtered
ox, thickly lined with felt inside. And when the season of frost comes on,
stitch together skins of firstling kids with ox-sinew, to put over your back
[545] and to keep off the rain.

Observe
all this until the year is ended and you have nights and days of equal length,
and Earth, the mother of all, bears again her various fruit. When Zeus has
finished [565] sixty wintry days after the solstice, then the star Arcturus
leaves the holy stream of Ocean and first rises brilliant at dusk

But
when the artichoke flowers,
and the chirping grass-hopper sits in a tree and pours down his shrill song
continually from under his wings in the season of wearisome heat, [585] then
goats are plumpest and wine sweetest; women are most wanton, but men are
feeblest, because Sirius parches head and knees and the skin is dry through
heat.

But
when Orion and Sirius are come into mid-heaven, [610] and rosy-fingered Dawn
sees Arcturus,
then cut off all the grape-clusters, Perses, and bring them home. Show them to
the sun ten days and ten nights: then cover them over for five, and on the
sixth day draw off into vessels the gifts of joyful Dionysus.

Marry
a maiden, so that you can teach her careful ways, [700] and especially marry
one who lives near you, but look well about you and see that your marriage will
not be a joke to your neighbors. For a man wins nothing better than a good
wife, and, again, nothing worse than a bad one, a greedy soul who [705] roasts
her man without fire, strong though he may be, and brings him to a raw old age.

Never
put the ladle upon the mixing-bowl [745] at a wine party, for malignant
ill-luck is attached to that. When you are building a house, do not leave it
rough hewn, or a cawing crow may settle on it and croak. Take nothing to eat or
to wash with from un-charmed pots, for in them there is mischief. [750] Do not
let a boy of twelve years sit on things which may not be moved,
for that is bad, and makes a man unmanly; nor yet a child of twelve months, for
that has the same effect.

[780]
Avoid the thirteenth of the waxing month for beginning to sow: yet it is the
best day for setting plants. The sixth of the mid-month is very unfavorable for
plants, but is good for the birth of males, though unfavorable for a girl
either to be born at all or to be married.

The
tenth is favorable for a male to be born; but, for a girl, the fourth day [795]
of the mid-month. On that day tame sheep and shambling, horned oxen, and the
sharp-fanged dog and hardy mules to the touch of the hand.

That
man is happy and lucky in them who knows all these things and does his work
without offending the deathless gods, who discerns the omens of birds and
avoids transgression.

This is certainly a plebian story when compared to the epic
battle at Troy or the lives of the gods. But we gain a view into what the
everyman farmer is trying to do from day to day – survive in the battle with
nature – and he feels like one of us.

Friday, May 13, 2011

The fall of Minoan Crete, and for that matter Mycenae, are a
mystery. There is evidence of fire at both locations as if they were attacked
and burned. Was this the so called Dorian invasion or something else?

An interesting piece to this puzzle is the eruption of the
Santorini Volcano, which had a significant impact on the region, especially
Crete. Its part in the destruction of the Minoan civilization is still being
debated, so I’ll let you can form your own opinion after you’ve seen the facts.

Let’s start with the geography. The image below is a
satellite view of Santorini (known as Thira in antiquity).

The existing islands
are actually the rim of the crater of an active volcano. The volcano collapsed
during an eruption circa 1525 B.C. and has been re-building
itself since that time. The center island, Nea Kaimene, is made up of new lava deposits as the
volcano rebuilds its cone. The island now reaches about 400 feet above the surface of the Aegean.
I have marked the location of known Minoan settlements on Santorini showing
that Thira was a Cretan satellite during the Minoan Period.

The first of these settlements was accidentally discovered in 1859 when part of Thirasia was being mined for material to be used in the construction of the Suez Canal. As the construction teams worked to cut away layers of ash, they exposed the ancient stone walls.

The next photo is one I took when I was in Santorini last
September. I’m standing on Thira Island and you can see Nea Kaimene at the left
in the foreground and Thirasia Island behind it in the distance.

To get a sense of the magnitude of the explosion of the
Santorini Volcano, we can use the August 27th, 1883 eruption of the
volcano Cracatoa in Java as a guide. When that volcano exploded, windows were rattled at a
distance of 100 miles. A column of ash rose seventeen miles into the atmosphere
and there were a series of four violent explosions resulting in the collapse of
the cone. The third of the four explosions was the loudest noise ever recorded
on earth – heard on the Isle of Rodriquez
3,080 miles away. Wind-born ash fell over a very wide area, including 17
inches at Port Alfred South Africa, 4,500 miles away. We have excellent data on
the spread of the ash cloud because of the records of ships in the area. For
example, the ship Tweed recorded seven inches of ash on her decks at a distance
of 370 miles. The Cracatoa eruption was accompanied by a Tsunami which
generated fifty foot waves and devastated all coastal developments and towns in
the region.

I have provided the Cracatoa story to make a point.

The Santorini
eruption was significantly (4 times) larger than Cracatoa and was the largest
volcanic eruption on earth in the last ten thousand years.

Crete is only 68
miles from Santorini.

Now we know that in the Late Minoan 1B period, circa 1500
B.C, the northern coast of Crete (east of Knossos) was wiped out. There is
archaeological evidence of ash deposits in during this period and similar
deposits have been found in the seabed of the Aegean. Similarly, we know that
the Minoan settlements on Santorini were buried under ash in the Later Minoan
1A period, perhaps 10-20 years before the Cretan deposits. How can this be
explained?

The evidence points to a two stage eruption: the first
dropping pumice over a wide area and the second, years later, dropping ash as
the volcano collapsed, causing a Tsunami and possibly an earthquake.

Some of the structural damage to Northern Crete could not have been caused
by ash or Tsunami, only by an earthquake. How do we then reconcile the eruption
with the fire damage? The burned remains pre-date the volcanic
eruption because they were buried in the ash, so the Minoans must have been
attacked previous to the eruption or an earthquake must have preceded the eruption and caused the fire. The ash probably made Northeastern
Crete uninhabitable for a time because of the destruction of plant life.

The tsunami itself would have been an incredible force at 75
feet high, reaching Crete twenty minutes after the explosion on Santorini at a
speed of 200 miles per hour. As far as the earthquake goes, we have too little
data to positively relate a Santorini earthquake to the damage in Crete.

The image below shows distances from Santorini to various
places in the region including Egypt. This gives a sense of the devastation
that must have visited the surrounding islands.

We have to conclude that Crete was attacked and burned by
some outside agency prior to the devastation caused by the Santorini Volcano,
but the eruption probably destroyed any Minoan attempts to restart their
civilization and opened the door for the Mycenaeans to occupy Crete and end the
island civilization for good.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

I was in Erie Pennsylvania last weekend attending the AAH annual
meeting and I found it wonderful to be immersed in antiquity and away from the
real world for a couple of days.

There were 90 in attendance including representatives from
Britain, New Zealand, Finland, Germany, and Russia. The presentations were set
up in panels with a moderator and three or four presenters on a particular
topic. After the papers were given, the moderator would present his own views
or comment on the other presentations. Questions then followed.

Recent graduates seemed uniformly nervous, often reading
their papers without looking up. The more experienced ones were at ease with
their subject and it showed.

One panel’s topic was New Directions in Warfare. Papers
included, Moral Contexts of the Roman Siege and Centurions:
Discipline, Violence, and Authority in the Roman Army.

Another, The First Punic War, featured Forgotten POWs in
the First Punic War and The Claudii and the First Punic War.

One of the presenters serves as the historical advisor to
the Starz series Spartacus, Blood and Sand and he had many interesting
stories to tell about his battles with the script writers over historical
accuracy. He lost most of the time because of production constraints, story
flow, or the need for dramatic impact.

I never was able to locate the kind of history I write in this blog at the meeting –
multi-disciplinary with presentation of large issues. These guys (and gals)
live in History and Classics departments which stick to their topics (in minutia). The intent is toward new work, new research -- not trying to make a bigger
picture out of what’s already known. In the end, I’m happy I don’t have to live
with their constraints.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

The Greek language is one of the oldest and most important
of all languages, because it served as
the vehicle for many important works of antiquity, including the Bible. The story of the development of Greek is
fascinating because it took the solving of several mysteries to fill in the holes left by history. In the end, we have been able to unlock the puzzle that connects Greek with the symbolic
languages of the Minoan period.

In 1900, the British archeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, was
excavating Knossos Crete when he discovered clay tablets containing three different symbolic
languages. The first type was similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs, the second more
stylized than the Hieroglyphs and closer to what one might call a real language,
and the third was even more advanced than the second, although akin to it
in style and content.

Evans spent the rest of his life trying to decipher these
three language forms without success, partly because he stuck to the stubborn
notion that the all three were Cretan.

Later, in 1939, Carl Blegen came to Messenia in the western
Peloponnese looking for Nestor’s castle, which had been described in the Iliad.
The city he sought was ancient Pylos, north of the modern city of that name. Blegen
began to dig on a hilltop, reasoning that to be the likely spot for a castle,
and began to unearth significant artifacts, including clay tablets that matched
the third type found in Knossos. Had this language traveled from the mainland
to Crete or the reverse? Was this the Minoan language? The answers to these
questions was revealed when similar tablets were found at Mycenae and Thebes.
The language written on them, named Linear B, was Mycenaean! The presence of
Linear B at Knossos meant that the
Mycenaeans had taken control of Knossos after the fall of the Minoan
civilization, and brought their own language with them.

The two remaining tablet types
from Knossos came to be called Minoan Hieroglyphic and Linear A.

The Minoan hieroglyphics look like this:

Linear A looks like this:

Michael Vetris, an English architect and classics scholar,
spent 17 years trying to decipher Linear B before finally braking the
code in 1951. Vetris discovered that the language contained both syllables and logograms. The syllables
were used to form words, while the logograms were used to identify assets
(objects of value) for accounting purposes. Linear B was shown to be a primitive
form of the Greek language, by noting that the endings on words changed -- a primitive
form of declension. Linear B is written by connecting syllables with
hyphens using the same form as that of the tablets (a small vertical line was
the syllable divider on them).

So de-do-me-na is translated as dedomena meaning contribution.

All of the tablets found with Linear B writing were part of
an inventory and accounting system utilized for the regional king. They record
numbers of domestic animals, crops, religious offerings, weapons, and manufactured
goods.

When the Mycenaean Age ended during the 1200-1100 B.C.
timeframe, Linear B writing was lost, but the spoken language was
carried forward by the surviving Greeks. A new written form of the Greek language then
developed around 750 B.C. when the Phoenician alphabet was adapted to Hellas.

The word qa-si-re-u in Linear B translates as quasileus or Basileus in Greek.
In Mycenaean, quasileus means chief or head man; in Greek Basileus means king.

Linear B was used by the Mycenaean people from approximately
1500-1200 B.C. Linear A was used in Crete and some of the Greek Islands between the years 1800-1400 B.C, during the
height of the Minoan Age. The hieroglyphs (1700-1600 B.C.) overlap the Linear A
scripts in time, but it is unclear how they are related. Despite the efforts of
many, the hieroglyphs and Linear A have never been deciphered.

One of the most interesting aspects of this story is the
survival of the tablets themselves. There were approximately 1400 found at
Pylos and 3000 at Knossos, although many of the later were broken pieces. At
the time of the fall of the Mycenaean Age the structures at Pylos and Knossos
were burned, probably by an invading army. The clay tablets would not have
survived without the fire because the heat turned clay into ceramic, making them resistant to erosion. Ironically, an act of war had preserved history.

The tablets tell us much about the physical aspects of
Mycenaean life: how much cattle was raised, what crops were grown, and what
industry was present, but it’s a cold history, without emotion. They tell us nothing about the way people lived, what they believed, or how their political system operated.